The 'Secret Playbook' for Congress' Budget Battle

From former Congressman Ernest Istook via Washington Times --

WASHINGTON, September 28, 2013 — Did you miss the hidden-ball trick play the Senate pulled on Friday? Is the House running trick plays of its own?

The budget game is confusing, so let me share part of the playbook I learned during my 14 years as a Congressman.

Game Situation

To start, Friday’s 68-30 Senate vote “waived the provisions” (Congress-speak for “broke the promises”) of the budget rules. The 2011 budget deal promised spending cuts in exchange for adding over $2 trillion to the debt ceiling.

Now Senators voted to free themselves from that 2011 promise. Expect them to offer new promises (to be broken at some future date) to justify another increase in the debt limit.

The Senate vote went mostly unnoticed because reporters focused instead on the vote on cloture. Every Democrat, aided by 12 Republicans, approved the waiver of budget rules; the roll call is online here.

Now the House counters by proposing a 1-year delay in Obamacare. Or would their plan delay only part of Obamacare? The difference is crucial.

More confusion and trick plays are coming, so prepare yourself with these excerpts from the Secret Playbook that Congress uses in times like this:

Punt, Pass and Kick

Congress does what football coaches cannot: Changes the rules to extend the game. They buy time, procrastinate.

Passing short-term legislation is a punt. It briefly takes pressure off politicians by kicking deadlines into the future. Extensions may last just a few days, or several months. Current authority to spend expires October 1st; on Friday the Senate voted to move that to November 15. Since 2001, Congress has passed 50 continuing resolutions that extended spending approval.

They buy bigger chunks of time by raising the debt ceiling. Deficit problems are pushed a year or two into the future by allowing the Treasury to borrow more. We’ve reached the current limit of $16.7 trillion and the Administration has designated October 17 as the date when their accounting gimmicks won’t work anymore. Without raising the debt ceiling, our government must make do with the measly $2.7 trillion it gets from tax collections.

Trick Plays

Football’s trick plays aren’t new and neither are Congress’.

The Senate’s hidden-ball play worked because other votes got all the attention instead of the vote on waiving the budget rules.

Other classic trick plays include:

The Time Shift: A great example is House Speaker John Boehner’s pledge that every dollar of borrowing must be offset “one for one” with a dollar of spending cuts. The $2 trillion borrowed under the 2011 deal is all spent. The spending “cuts,” like the sequester, are actually reductions in growth of spending and not reductions in spending levels. Those cuts are spread out over 10 years.

Calling this “one-for-one” is like trading 100 dollars for 100 pennies. It’s one item for one item, but they’re not equivalent. Promises of future spending cuts are unreliable. But politicians praise them as though they are real and they are spectacular.

Conditional Approvals: Congress will direct that something be done “unless” the president or a Cabinet secretary certifies that it should not be done. Congress brags about advancing projects like the Keystone XL Pipeline, while still letting Presidents do the opposite.

Blue-Ribbon Panels: The last budget deal established a commission with supposed authority to fix budget problems. Except the commission couldn’t get the necessary consensus any better than Congress could. Plus the real authority stayed with Congress anyway.

Procedural Gimmicks: Internal rules are created so the House and/or Senate restricts itself from certain actions. Later they can simply vote to waive these rules. That’s what the Senate did on Friday.

Promote Consolation Prizes

This part of the playbook teaches politicians to treat a loss as at least a moral victory because you get a little something. It’s the equivalent of a football coach who brags after a defeat:

“We got more first downs than they did.”

“We outscored them in the third quarter.”

“At least we weren’t shut out,” or

“I saw some things today that will lead to victories in the future.”

House Republican leaders tested this approach. First they suggested Members should support current spending levels, without de-funding Obamacare, so long as they got a consolation prize. That got shot down so now it’s hard to tell what revised changes are major and what are minor.

For example:

Delaying the individual mandate: If the entirety of Obamacare were delayed, it helps the country. Yet if “delaying Obamacare” only means putting off this mandate, it could make Obamacare harder to repeal in the long run. Sure, delaying the individual mandate sounds good. But meantime workers keep losing hours and losing coverage while Obamacare’s other mandates wipe out affordable private insurance.

A mandate delay splits the united opposition and lets the law’s supporters posture as moderates. Fixing an ugly wart doesn’t fix the many things broken by Obamacare.

Eliminate the medical device tax: This placates one segment of Obamacare, putting them to sleep so they’re less likely to support future efforts to repeal or defund the rest of the law.

Medical malpractice reform: Again fixing a wart but ignoring broken bones.

Another consolation prize often offered is language expressing “the intent of Congress” to do something, or requiring the White House “to propose a plan.”

These are political jukes.

It’s like a runner who makes a stutter step or gives a head fake to avoid a tackler. Provisions like these don’t change anything; they just confuse the public.

Watch Out For The Referees

The referees don’t call it fair in this budget game. These refs rarely blow the whistle on Obama and his team. They’re allowed to commit personal fouls, cheap shots, late hits and unnecessary roughness. They can freely accuse Republicans of throwing temper tantrums, being terrorists, arsonists, juvenile, crazy, etc.

In politics, the referees also moonlight as cheerleaders.

Running Out the Clock

Although Congress can buy time, the time advantage remains on Obama’s side. Once millions of Americans are forced to get their health coverage through Obamacare, the law becomes harder than ever to reverse.

The President and Democrats don’t need to score to win. They established their lead when Obamacare was passed in 2010. Because it received ten years of guaranteed money for overhead, the program is not shut down even if other parts of government are.

The Pep Talk

The Left claims that conservatives oppose Obamacare because they fear that it will work. Not so. The fear is that millions of Americans will be trapped in an expensive boondoggle because Obamacare has wiped out their alternatives.

Too many employers have already cancelled coverage. Insurers are still banned from offering policies except the full-featured, high-priced coverge mandated by Obamacare. Delaying other features won’t change this.

Repealing pieces of the law would make it harder to repeal the many bad parts that remained.

Congress is predictable in its legislative stunting, but the current political standoff has no good and easy outcome. And neither does Obamacare itself.

The Idiots Guide to Defunding Obamacare

From Ernest Istook via Washington Times --

De-funding Obamacare is tough politically. It is not complicated, though, even though some want you to think that.

De-funding is a simple idea surrounded by political jargon and double-speak. If voters are convinced that the task is too complex, they might forgive politicians for not going all-out to de-fund it. De-funding in turn is still second-best to outright repeal.

So here is an “Idiot’s Guide to De-Funding Obamacare.”

The title isn’t intended to call anyone a dummy, but to stress that this is not rocket science. Anyone who understands how a checking account works can understand how to stop Obamacare by taking away its funding.

Basics of a checking account:

A checking account requires that you:

1. Set up the account at the bank (Get an account number; have checks printed; etc.)
2. Deposit money in the account upfront and add more as needed
3. Write checks not to exceed your available balance

Automatic deposits are common, such as for paychecks or Social Security benefits. Automatic debits are common to pay mortgages, rent, utility bills and so on.

It is less common to write post-dated checks. They cannot be deposited right away, but when the due date arrives, recipients don’t have to watch the mail for their checks.

But unless the money is in the bank, a post-dated check will bounce just like any other check.

If you follow this overview of checking accounts then, congratulations. You can understand how to de-fund Obamacare.

Basics of de-funding Obamacare:

Every federal program gets the equivalent of a banking account within the U.S. Treasury. When each year’s spending bills are passed ― called appropriations ― then automatic monthly deposits are set in motion, coming from the Treasury. The program spends those funds and the process repeats the following year.

Normally, a program runs out of money at the end of the fiscal year, September 30. Without a new series of deposits, the program then halts. Sometimes there is money left over, but that’s a different story.

The rest of government “shuts down” without new funding, except for essential services like the military, Social Security benefits, and air traffic control. But Obamacare has its own unique exemption from a shutdown.

In essence, Obamacare already was given ten years of post-dated checks from the U.S. Treasury. The original legislation in 2010 guaranteed a decade’s worth of money to cover its overhead and administrative costs ― $105-billion through 2019. Without this administrative processing, the Treasury has no way to handle the other money that would pay actual health care costs and insurance subsidies.

These “post-dated checks” were intended to make it impossible for any future Congress to curtail the program, just in case the Democrats didn’t keep full control of Congress after 2010, which they didn’t.

It takes new legislation, passed by both houses of Congress and approved by the President, to stop payment on those ten years of post-dated checks. Normally, if the House and Senate disagree, then there is a stalemate and no money is provided. But because Obamacare has automatic funding, any stalemate has the opposite outcome: The funding goes on as scheduled.

Unless, of course, the checks bounce.

If the Treasury doesn’t have enough money to cover all other spending plus Obamacare’s costs, then Obamacare grinds to a stop. The only alternative would be a presidential decision to halt instead services that he consistently claims are essential and highest priority. Imagine President Obama choosing to fund Obamacare instead of Social Security, withholding Social Security checks and blaming others for his misplaced priorities. Without extra borrowing ― raising the debt ceiling ― to cover all the massive checks, Obamacare is de-funded unless Obama publicly chooses to let other programs rot.

Obama says no and refuses even to negotiate about borrowing

The President labels this a failure to pay our bills, but that isn’t true. We can pay all our existing bills out of tax receipts. It’s the new expenses that require borrowing.

This year’s tax revenue is an all-time high, about $2.7-trillion. So we can pay $2.7-trillion without borrowing a penny, covering existing bills plus some new expenses. We have no need to borrow unless we spend more. Unfortunately, current plans call for spending $800-billion more than tax receipts. That would requiring revisiting the law that limits our credit line.

We’ve already blown past the legal debt limit that Obama and Congress set two years ago, namely $16.7-trillion. The Treasury Department is hiding this fact. They use gimmicks like raiding federal retirement trust funds while claiming the raid doesn’t count as borrowing.

We’re told that we must borrow because the budget isn’t balanced. But turn that around: If we stop borrowing, the budget balances. We just have to decide where to cut. A good start would be Obamacare; we don’t need this extra expense that is already costing jobs and lowering take-home pay.

Obama refuses even to negotiate over the debt ceiling. He wants unlimited borrowing. He claims we already spent the money so now we have to pay the bills. That simply isn’t true; most spending is for future bills that we could avoid by reducing the size of government.

Obama makes people dizzy. First, he approved the spending he’s now criticizing. Next, he blames Congress for the level of spending. Then he says we can’t cut spending because it would hurt essential programs.

The way to de-fund Obamacare is not to write it any more checks and to stop payment on the post-dated checks.

Obamacare’s tricky post-dated checks were written when Nancy Pelosi was still Speaker of the House. She is one of the richest members of Congress. She should cover her own checks.

Ernest Istook spent 25 years in public office, including 14 years in Congress. He was rated one of the top 25 conservatives in the U.S. House of Representatives. Then was a Heritage Foundation fellow and a fellow at Harvard's Insitute of Politics, where he led a study group on Propaganda in American Politics Today.